R. Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
 
<In the Sunday Aug. 29 Book World section of the Washington Post
<(supposedly the second 'best' newspaper in the country) Carolyn See
<published a piece
                                    [...]
 
For what it's worth, you can read the article online at
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/29/026l-082999-idx.html
 
I don't personally hold book reviewers in daily newspapers to
particularly high standards, but occasionally they say things
that can provide reality checks (for, OK, not *just* academics,
but also 'serious readers', writer-readers, people who don't
get out enough, and anyone else who subscribes to lists like
this for whatever reason -- am I being inclusive enough?).
Carolyn See may be an idiot, and there's no excuse for some
of the sloppy journalism there, but is her dismissive attitude
toward the Cantos really atypical?  It seems like there is a norm in
popular journalistic writing about  Pound which goes
something along the lines of "one of the
century's great poets, who made important contributions to
blah, blah, blah... but hardly anyone reads him and no wonder --
who would want to bother with such difficult... blah, blah,
incoherent blah in blah-teen different languages... and anyway
he was a crypto-modernist-fascist traitor to boot."
A qualified dismissal, usually without the slightest hint of curiosity,
even curiosity motivated by hostility, on the part of the writer.
I don't have any great conclusion to draw from this (and there are
so many factors here which have nothing to do with Pound that I
doubt it's worth pursuing, unless as an exercise in pop. culture
studies); I merely note a phenomenon.  See's article isn't particularly
viscious or errant (except for that misleading chronology); it's just
another tally mark.
 
I wonder what she means by 'atonal poetry' though?
<smirk>
 
 
--
Brett Zombro
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